I've only played 5 or 6 matches, filled with noobs like me. All of them dragged on way too long, after it was clear who would win.

I think marine wins were over a bit quicker (still too long imo), but aliens vs the last base of endless respawning marines took forever. 10 minutes of Onos charging in, killing 3-4 marines and retreating again...

This is probably a bigger issue with noob games, so... any tips? I've been on both sides of this.

Maybe a simple vote to surrender would help.

This is a huge deal for me, it's one of the reasons I don't play MOBA games.

What it requires is teamwork... yeah I know, a team game that requires teamwork. Go figure.

Aliens have so many tools to end a game, you just have to know how to use them. A couple of oni who are getting covered in umbra by a lerk can tank damage so a couple of gorges with bilebomb can take down the powernode in no time. The lerk should spore the shit out of the base after having umbraed the oni, that way marines can't see anything. The rest of the team can be fades or skulks that pick apart the marines in the chaos. If the aliens actually use all the abillities that they have then the marines stand no chance.

As a commander, once we've locked in 6-8 resource nodes and are on our way to win, I create an "Onos Refuelling Station" close to the marine base, full with healing crags, cloak and onos eggs in it. Few bases can withstand 5 onos charging in, ruining shit, then running away and getting healed under 1 minute.

Players have yet to learn to love the gorge, their acid AoE attack wrecks multiple buildings fast, and their healing adds a lot of sustain to big expensive units.

I do the same thing I was playing refinery as aliens and once we had them held to flow control I had crags, shifts and shades in all the major entrances. They just cannot survive the onslaught of healed aliens spawning feet from the marine base. As stated bile bomb is one of the best attacks in the game it drops exo-suits and buildings in a heartbeat.

This has been a "problem" for a long time and the solution requires some coordination. Aliens must get 2/3 onos and just tank bullets to get the power down. Marines should try to egg lock. This is how it worked in the beta anyway. The thing is that this game, your not supposed to do anything (much) solo. Its a concept that hasn't quite been pickup up yet.

The problem isn't with coordination. The problem is with game design. When the Marines bear down on an Alien foe with endgame weapons like ARCs, Grenade Launchers, and Exosuits, all three of these things are designed to destroy Eggs, ending any possible Alien resistance, which ties in with the fact that Aliens are weakest near their Hive. This effectively means the game ends once the Marines reach an Alien Hive in force. When Aliens bear down on the Marines, the Marines are at their strongest inside of their own base. They have a Distress Beacon, an uninterruptable respawn mechanism, recyclable weapons, Observatories to detect incoming foes, an Armory to infinitely replenish ammunition, and presumably Sentries. While Aliens have a forced-respawn at an attacked Hive, Shade, and Whips. But in exchange, they cannot evolve upgrades or lifeforms while the enemy is in their Hive.

The Aliens clearly cannot compete with the Marines' superior offense and defense whether they're bearing down on the Marine base or having the Marines bear down on theirs. The Aliens' so-called "mobility" becomes worthless once the Marines are wrecking their Hive with Phase Gates teleporting Marines all over the map, or when the Marines only have one base left to attack.

And add to all of this the ease of losing material as an Alien team. When you are under attack, you have no Phase Gates or Distress Beacons, someone HAS to respond by traversing the map. Aliens cannot recycle structures that they expect will be destroyed. Aliens cannot reacquire a lost lifeform (not to mention Alien lifeforms are far more expensive than Marines' weapons when comparing effectiveness). It's very hard for Marines to lose materiel, whereas Aliens lose assets readily to a single Marine, since it only takes one Marine to obliterate upgrade structures and a Hive with his Knife, but a Skulk trying to wipe out an enemy base can potentially take ages to chew through it, even after the Power is down and no one is respawning. Not to mention the Skulk doesn't get 50% damage resistance and infinite health and ammo as the Commander wills it.

tl;dr Aliens get weaker the closer they fight to their Hive. Marines get stronger the closer they fight to their base. This asymmetry makes the game sometimes endless for an otherwise victorious Alien team, and hopeless for a losing Alien team.

Another thing: you can kill eggs, but can't seem to kill spawning in Marines. I sat there for a while biting the little hologram thing and the marine still just spawned right on in and shot me for my efforts.

What Rath said. It's just an issue with cordination. The newer players don't know the maps like the back of their hands yet and are still adjusting to the way ns2 plays out. After these players get a few wins/defeats under their belts they will start to realize the importance of staying in a group and listening to commander.

Some of us don't just not know the maps, but are terrible and don't really understand the concepts at all. We need more games under our belts and a patient, but competent, commander explaining what to do (and more importantly, why - which I had last night).

The issue is marine scaling versus alien scaling. A 3/3 marine out of the spawn IP can hold out for a long time. Aliens don't get any such scaling. Carapace is binary, you either have it or you don't. Skulks attacks never get any stronger.

I agree with how you said thing drag on too long, but to me it's more than a matter of length.

Usually the beginning of the game is very fun especially as a commander, but after one side is clearly winning, it stops being fun for everyone. As a winning commander, all you have to do is go through the upgrades put whips/turrets everywhere, and slowly build towards the enemy base while dropping onos/exo for the players. As a losing team, you can't do much and you're just waiting for the next game (a few people usually F4 there).

I've seen people say "yeah but a losing team can still win sometimes". I've only seen that happen twice :

One time while it seemed like we were gonna lose early game (close positions, lost all resource nodes and a hive, shotguns in our base), we suddenly won out of nowhere because the enemy commander, having just started playing NS2, still only had 1 command chair, and a lone skulk took it out. We laughed at first but it felt silly.

One time though it looked like we were going to win, lone marines kept killing our resource nodes all over the map, and the commander, being commander for the first time, didn't realize their importance and didn't replace them, as he spent his resources on onos and fade eggs to finish the game. We ended up starving and slowly being pushed back.

Notice how the common element here is a noob commander. That's really the only way that a winning team can lose. The other 95% of the time, it's a slow and unfun end of game for everyone.

I'd really like a "vote surrender" option for the commander. The marine comm can already dictate that by selling infantry stations but aliens comm can't. That'd make games shorter so you could play more of the most interesting part of the game : the undecided part.

What I have seen, it has mostly been a communication problem.
I try to use my microphone to tell people what needs to be done, but there seems to always be one person running solo destroying that power core or whatever.

1) It makes a defeatist mentality more easy to adopt. If one team gets a slight early advantage, or you lose a key fight, it might become way too easy for people to just say GG and surrender. This can totally neglect ANY of your commander's long term strategy, and makes comebacks totally impossible. This mentality is very prevalent in games like LoL, where players just decide to give up at the first sign of defeat, and it makes the game so much less fun when you only have half the team actually trying to salvage the game.

2) This isn't an ARTS like DotA2 where you get locked out or punished for leaving a game. If you don't want to attempt a comeback, you can just leave the server or change to a spectator, and you don't have to worry about losing MMR or whatever.

3) If you're losing and you "know" you're going to lose, and you just surrender, you miss out on any opportunity to develop your skills as a player. You can't learn if you just give up whenever you face adversity. You have to figure out how to adapt to different enemies, and different situations, and some of these situations only arise when you're losing.

4) A coordinated team has plenty of tools to end the game against a less coordinated one (as noted in other posts.)

There is a line that people fail to draw with defeatist mentality. Yes there is no point in early despair, however once the other team has FULL map control they can only lose the game by giving it to you. Yes I've seen comebacks, but it's because even the winning team lost interest and left the server!

Drawing that line can be difficult. As you pointed out despairing too early ruins the fun of the game. However in my opinion holding out against certain odds also is not fun. I suggest people to surrender because starting a new game would be more enjoyable for all of the players currently on the server. Otherwise you are simply forcing people to leave by drawing out a dead game. This is a problem especially with auto-balance, where the majority of a team f4s, the game doesn't end, but then only 3-4 people from the winning team can spawn.

The reason to surrender a losing game is because everyone is able to develop their skills more in a new game. Shooting aliens as they pour into marine command does not build skill. Killing marines like fish in a barrel does not build skill. Camping eggs does not build skill.

Watch SC2 - do pro players wait until their last unit is dead, or is there a point where they realize it is physically impossible to come back? (without the other person leaving)